In September last year Bing and Twitter renewed their relationship with some weird twitter exchanges. Not much was known at that time and we’ve been hoping that Bing will help searching for tweets. As it turns out, Bing has some different plans. Microsoft has tried real-time social updates from Twitter being shown on Bing in the past. I use Bing as my default search engine and when I searched for Pepsi Next, I noticed a small note below the first search result:

Bing not only tells me that a particular story is trending on twitter but also how many shares in the past few hours. This is deep meta data information for a search engine in real-time. My guess is, the number of shares on twitter are also influencing the placement of a link in search result. The Ad Age article most likely has more shares than the rest of the articles.

It makes a lot of sense for a search engine to weigh links based on Twitter interaction since Facebook isn’t exactly known for rapid, real-time link sharing. Facebook’s integration in Bing is more to do with social relevance, while Twitter is more to do with current relevance—a smart approach.